Crossing Oceans (21 page)
He looked down at it but made no response. “Anyway, I tried to go back to sleep, but it kept nagging me. I figured the only way I was getting any rest was if I checked it out. I really didn’t think . . . Once I got outside, I heard splashing. I ran as fast as I could.” He looked at me with eyes so haunted I couldn’t bear to hold his gaze. I wanted to comfort him but had nothing to give.
He let out several deep breaths before continuing. “I saw her go under and went in. It took so long to bring her to shore. I don’t know how she got out so far.”
It felt like I was moving out of hell into purgatory as numbness replaced grief. I turned to my father. “When did you . . . ?”
He stopped pacing and leaned against the wall. I don’t know whether it was the harsh lighting or the circumstances, but he looked so very old.
“I heard Craig cry for help. I ran outside. He told me to call 911. I didn’t know what happened.” He looked at me then, and I felt that for the first time in a very long time he actually saw me. “I yelled for you, Jenny, but you and your grandma sleep so heavy.”
I buried my face in my knees, trying to process it. A picture of my daughter thrashing in the water, panicked for air, played like a horror movie in my mind. It was too much to bear.
Mama Peg slipped one hand into mine, the other into Craig’s. “Jack, come pray with us.”
Through sobs and whimpers, each of them petitioned God for healing. How many times, I wondered, had they prayed the same for my mother? for me? How many times had I prayed this for myself? And yet I was still dying.
When it came my turn, I did not bother with this seemingly impotent request. One simple plea ascended from the deepest, most anguished part of my soul—
Have mercy.
Afterward, we took turns speculating why Isabella would be in the lake. My father assumed that she wanted to swim in it one last time. Mama Peg considered that it might be some sort of symbolic baptism into her new life. Craig thought maybe she was rebelling somehow.
It was clear to me that all of these theories were faulty. She was still terrified of submersion. I had only recently coaxed her back into taking a bath instead of a shower. I wondered if, in her childish rationalizations, she thought I was sending her away because she had done something bad, and as a punishment, she made herself do what she feared most.
The possibility sickened me, but it was the only thing that made sense.
We waited at least an hour for someone to tell us what was going on. When my father stopped a nurse in the hall, she said, “We have time to save your granddaughter or explain, but not both.”
He let her go.
I sat on the floor, hugging my knees. Mama Peg rubbed my back. “Jenny, please sit up here with me. No telling what kind of funk is growing down there. Think of your immune system.”
“Good,” I muttered. “I hope I catch something.”
Dressed in the ridiculous combination of sweatpants and wingtip shoes, my father paced to and fro. He traced the same path over and over, stopping in front of the TV, then the empty magazine rack. TV. Magazine rack. TV. Magazine rack. TV. Rack.
Click click clack. Click click clack. Click click clack.
I couldn’t take it anymore. “Will you sit down already?”
He continued on as if he hadn’t heard me.
I slapped my palm on the seat of an empty chair.
Mama Peg squeezed my shoulder. “Jenny, he’s grieving too.”
Craig slid off his chair and took a place next to me. He laid his arm across my shoulders. “She’s going to be okay,” he whispered in my ear.
I looked into his eyes. Red and swollen, they offered no comfort, only a reflection of my own fear.
“If she lives, it’s because of you,” I said.
He licked his lips. “No. It’s a miracle I even heard her.”
Just when it seemed we’d rot in that room waiting for an update, a man in a lab jacket with a stethoscope draped around his neck appeared in the doorway. He had our full attention. “I have good news and bad.”
Good news: she’s alive. Bad news: she’s a vegetable.
He paused as he looked me over. “What happened to you?”
I pulled my long hair over the bloodstain on my shoulder. “Bloody nose.”
“Do you need—”
“Just tell us,” I said.
He looked as rough as we did. He scratched his five-o’clock shadow and took a seat in the one of the empty chairs across from us. He looked at me with eyes that reminded me of a basset hound’s. “You’re her mother?”
My stomach turned and tightened. “Yes.”
“She’s a beautiful little girl.”
“Just tell us,” I repeated.
Like a defendant on trial watching the jury for clues of a verdict, my eyes were attuned to every nuance of his body language. When his shoulders slumped slightly, I wanted to cry. “She’s not dead yet, but she will be,” I blurted.
He looked at me with a strange expression. “We just don’t know. When someone goes into a coma, it can be for hours, it can be for years, or it can be forever. We just don’t know.”
My father bellowed a visceral sound as he lifted a fist to the ceiling. “How much can I take? How much?” He covered his face with one hand while the other, still clenched, fell at his side.
Unfazed, the doctor turned back to me. “I can’t say I know what you’re going through. I’m a parent, but my children are home in bed.”
“You hope.”
He gave me a questioning look. “Excuse me?”
“She was home in bed too,” I said. “Safe and sound.”
He looked liked he’d rather be anywhere but there. “I’m sorry.”
“Can we see her?” Mama Peg asked.
He studied her with a concerned look. “Are you breathing all right?”
She coughed. “I’m fine.”
I noticed then that she was the worst shade of gray I’d ever seen on her. Alarm filled me. “Mama Peg, are you okay?”
Ignoring me, she answered him. “Do y’all have any oxygen tanks you could loan?”
He leaned over hers and checked the dial before looking back up. “How long has it been empty?”
She didn’t answer.
He shook his head and hurried out of the room.
“Why didn’t you say something?” I asked. “We’re in a hospital, for heaven’s sake.”
She looked at me but said nothing. It was a stupid question.
A nurse walked in lugging a green, metal tank. Filling the room with clinks and clangs, she slid my grandmother’s empty tank out and replaced it with a new one.
Mama Peg exchanged the tubing, turned a knob, sucked in a deep breath, and coughed. “Sweet air, I’ve missed you.”
I stared at her a moment, watching the pink return to her skin. “Don’t you do that again.”
The nurse picked up the spent tank. “I was going to say the same thing.”
Mama Peg nodded. “I won’t. Thank you.”
“Can we see her now?” I asked.
The nurse glanced at the large round clock hanging above the doorway, then back to me. “In a minute, but understand that when you see her, she’s going to look a little frightening. A respirator is breathing for her.”
I’d envisioned myself on life support many times, but never in my wildest dreams had I imagined Isabella. But at least she was alive, and where there was life, there was hope.
“What are her chances?” The question came from my father.
Dr. Reid stepped back through the doorway. He mouthed a thank-you to the nurse, who nodded at him and left. “The fact that CPR was initiated so soon improves her chances, but ultimately, your guess is as good as mine.”
“Will you pray for her?” I asked.
The look he gave me told me that wasn’t within his scope of practice.
I stared hard at him, trying to will him into agreeing. As irrational as it was, I somehow felt as though his prayer, added to ours, might be the tipping point Isabella needed. “She’d pray for you.”
He studied the ground.
Anger welled up inside me at this man who, a moment ago, seemed full of compassion but now wouldn’t even pray for a dying little girl.
My grandmother laid her hand on my shoulder. “Thank you for everything, Dr. Reid.”
He slipped his hands into his lab jacket pockets and looked up. “I’ll pray,” he said. “I’ll say a prayer, for whatever it’s worth.”
When Mama Peg smiled at him, I realized that she hadn’t put in her false teeth. She seemed to realize it too and clamped her mouth shut.
With only two of us allowed to visit at a time, it was Mama Peg and I who followed the doctor through the pneumatic doors into the pediatric ICU—or PICU as he kept referring to it.
It was even brighter than the waiting room. A myriad of bells and alarms sounded from every direction. I wondered how patients got any sleep. My gaze flitted around, searching for Isabella, past walls of glass and nurses. The doctor touched my arm.
I jumped.
He put his hands up. “Didn’t mean to scare you. Before I go, I have a question. I got the basic story of what happened from the ER docs, but it didn’t make sense to me. Why would a child be swimming by herself at that time of morning?”
I tried to look around him. “I don’t know.”
He pulled his stethoscope off his neck, letting it hang from his hand. “Do you think it’s possible that she might have been depressed?”
His question knocked the wind out of me. I felt Mama Peg’s soft hand wrap around my arm and squeeze. “What? She’s five years old. You think she
wanted
to drown?”
His face flushed. “Pediatric suicide is rare, but not unheard of. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”
“Please,” I said, unable to take anymore. “Just show us where she is.”
The last time I had seen Isabella in a hospital, she was an infant. It seemed that the moment she was born, the nurses whisked her away for her first bath. Too impatient to wait for them to bring her back, I walked myself to the nursery so I could admire her through the glass. I looked past cribs lined up like train cars until my gaze fell on the most magnificent sight imaginable. A pink card hung above her with “Baby Lucas” scrawled on it between inky footprints. Fleshy rolls covered her arms and legs. She was so fat! I felt a grin, wider than the world, spread across my face. I kept thinking,
That roly-poly thing came out of me?
It didn’t seem possible.
When first I held her, her dark hair lay plastered against her head. But there, lying in the nursery under a warming light, magnificent ringlets sprang from her freshly washed head. My heart leaped and sank in the same instant. Those were David’s curls.
I watched her lovely face scrunch as the nurse slipped a thermometer under her arm. Her porcelain skin turned red as she clearly expressed her dislike of the procedure. Oh, she was beautiful! The nurse saw me in the window and picked up my naked baby girl. She held her up to the glass for me to get a better look. Perfect little feet dangled at the end of perfect little legs. She stopped crying and opened her eyes. Her sweet lips pursed as if preparing to nurse. . . .
From those same lips there now protruded a clear plastic tube that led to a ventilator. With each unnatural, gasping sound, air forced its way into her lungs. Another tube snaked out of her left nostril. A catheter drained urine from her bladder into a clear bag hanging from the end of the bed. An IV fed fluid into her arm. Monitors with incomprehensible zigzag readouts beeped sporadically.
I laid my hand over my mouth, my mind unable to grasp the truth my eyes were seeing. Her face was swollen beyond recognition. If it weren’t for the curls of brown sprawled against the stark white pillow beneath her head, I might not have known it was her. A layer of what looked like Vaseline glistened over her eyelids and lashes.
I felt as though a boulder had landed on my chest. I could barely breathe.
My baby. My poor baby.
This is what hell feels like,
I thought.
This is hell.
Mama Peg intertwined her arm with mine. Paralyzed by anguish in the doorway of Isabella’s hospital room, we held each other up. A nurse stood in the corner of the room near the ventilator, looking as though she were attending a wake.
“Can she hear us?” I asked her.
“Impossible to know for sure,” she said. “We assume that she can and talk to her about everything we’re doing. If she comes out of it, you can ask her if she remembers anything. That’s the only way to know for sure what she heard.”
“
When
she comes out of it,” I said.
Her face flushed and she averted her eyes.
Mama Peg stared hard at her. “
When
she comes out of it, we
will
ask her.”
I unlinked my arm from my grandmother’s and moved to my daughter’s side. I picked up her limp hand, placed it in my palm, and kissed it. She felt so foreign, so cold and lifeless. Something tapped against the back of my knees. I looked behind me to find that the nurse had brought me a chair. I sat and laid my forehead against my daughter’s shoulder.
I stayed there for some time, brushing curls from her forehead, tracing the curves of her face, and lamenting about all that I should have said but hadn’t. All we could have done if I hadn’t been so busy with things that didn’t really matter. All the dreams I had for her that might never come to pass now.
* * *
Someone touched my back and I jerked up, disoriented. As soon as I opened my eyes, bright lights hit me, along with the vague notion that something was wrong—something that I didn’t want to remember. I looked at my unconscious daughter and my heart sank.
“Jenny, it’s time to go home now,” my father said, and I realized it was his touch that had woken me.
I sat up and rubbed my eyes. “I can’t leave her.”
“Honey, let’s go check on your grandma, grab something to eat, and get cleaned up. I’ll bring you right back.”
I shook my head. “I’m not leaving her. What if she wakes up?”
He laid his hand on my shoulder. It felt so heavy. “Dr. Reid said he gave her medication so that won’t happen. She won’t wake up while we’re gone. I promise. Besides, David’s here. He wants to talk to you before he sees her.”
I felt shame that I hadn’t thought to call him. “Who told him?”